Epilogue
by Bismuth
Summary: Post ME3, destruction ending. If there was one benefit to the galaxy being embroiled in the war to end all wars with the Reapers it was that it camouflaged the budding, inter-species relationship between Commander Shepherd and Garrus Vakarian. The complications of their affections begin to unfold as the Reaper threat ends and the two are exposed publicly for the first time.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: This is going to be rated M for language and adult themes-still figuring out if I'm going to put other chapters on a LiveJournal account in light of new guidelines on FFnet. I'm also planning to try and update this every Sunday but that's a tentative schedule once my buffer is gone (it's at about fifty pages).

Disclaimer: all characters and ideas belong to Bioware.

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She would lose half her right hand and most of her lower body was mutilated past basic recognition of the human anatomy; her face was apparently repairable with extensive surgery but the left side looked like melted plastic, the eye a jellied mess pooling in a screaming, red socket. Doctors were impressed with how well her rib cage held up and even more impressed that her heart had not exploded—good engineering one of them said, it almost sounded like a half-hearted joke but no one cracked a smile. What wasn't charred or flayed on her was crushed; almost every bone in her body was suffering from fractures and breaks. The amputations were carried out as soon as she was determined stable enough not to go into shock and there were already cloned replacements being grown for future graft attempts. Commander Shepherd's life and its precarious balancing act with death was the focus of every news network still functioning in the galaxy but no one was getting any answers.

It was difficult to give a proper prognosis on her condition, the doctors said initially, because she was so tangled up with advanced technological implants that were neither on the available market for even the wealthiest patients nor remotely within the realm of medical knowledge. Cerberus scientists and agents began to show up shortly after it became clear Shepherd's chances were dwindling, an entire swarm of them descended on her hospital bed while a recently arrived Miranda Lawson barked directives at them. A few were wanted criminals by the Alliance but until the livelihood of the galaxy's most recognized hero could be guaranteed no one was willing to interfere. The salarians, in spite of a shaky relationship with the pro-krogan Alliance, surprised everyone by immediately sending their best surviving medical experts to assist and the turians were fast on their heels with the most advanced equipment they had available. Devastated as they were, the asari were slower to react but their best doctors were soon added to the milling crowd of professionals and prodigies who attended Shepherd's broken form.

There were daily calls over the net from Wrex who raged and blustered—never admitting his shame knowing the krogan could send no one to aid in this new little war that was playing out on the bloody field of Jane Shepherd's dying body. Why would any species evolve without secondary organs? They were all too damn soft, too damn vulnerable, he grumbled. Tali was much quieter about her helplessness, the quarians sent what provisions they could but human anatomy was too different. The turians were in a similar situation but had a few pieces of impressive medical tech that was involved in external treatments and one machine was posited with vastly improving the surgical precision of Shepherd's operations. But the quarians were couched in a totally different area of expertise: bacteria, viruses, overactive immune responses—Shepherd wasn't going to fall prey to the same pathogens that affected their species and so most of the attempted aid was of little consequence.

Other friends were being kept busy but checked in often—Liara was doing whatever Shadow Brokers did after the end of a war while involving herself in Thessia's reconstruction. Tali, while staying longer than anyone else but Garrus, left for Rannoch to fulfill her duties as an admiral. Alenko and Vega were still on Earth, just not with Shepherd. They, like the others, were working within their government's reclamation programs as they organized refugee camps and were flown in to deal with complicated rescue and recovery situations. Javik had disappeared after the last push against the Reapers but he kept turning up in different places—Thessia, Palaven, Tuchunka, and Earth were a few. Garrus wasn't sure exactly what he was up to but figured a man frozen for fifty thousand years had a right to wander a little. Joker, Traynor, and Cortez were still operating with the Normandy, it was hard to imagine them anywhere else. The Normandy was grounded initially after its return to Earth for inspection but was sent off again to run missions between the star systems and was serving as a courier, refugee transportation, supply runner, and everything else the Alliance could think to task its crew with.

Garrus should have been home on Palaven, his sister made it clear to him in their calls that she was confused by his lagging efforts to make it back to his family. He expected his father was disappointed too but Solana wasn't bringing it up in their talks. She wasn't the only person inquiring about his return either, Primarch Victus wanted him involved in Palaven's recovery and Garrus had no answer for his sister or his leader. His relationship with Commander Shepherd, while public enough to the Normandy's crew, had somehow managed to stay private enough that no one in the major media had picked up on it. If Allers had noticed anything she was keeping mum about it and it looked like Shepherd's Alliance crew respected their commander too much to leak personal information to the press.

Then again, maybe it had never been all that obvious. They spent time together, sure—even more time together than they did anyone else, but PDA was minimal. They were too damned busy trying to win the war to have the time their relationship deserved. There was that one moment back on Earth, in that city called London, where they had a particularly public kiss, but how many people actually saw them? And even if there were onlookers, how many of those people lived through that last push? It was a morbid train of thought but a true one; no one had said anything about human-turian heavy petting during Hammer. If Shepherd survived her injuries they might have the opportunity to finally go public. Until he knew for sure he didn't want to leave her side and he didn't know how to admit that to his family.

Trapped in an Earth hospital he had nothing to do but dwell on Shepherd's fragile state. Garrus didn't like visiting her but he hated being kept out of her room. The relief of knowing she was alive was washed away by the horror of seeing how narrow her escape from death was. It was painful seeing Shepherd gargling on her hospital bed, there were so many tubes in her she looked like a failed science experiment; there were ones pumping her full of chemicals and others for draining fluids, she had a few piping fresh blood into her veins and some others for nutrition. Her bed sheets were changed daily because she leaked _everywhere_. Even worse was trying to keep his eyes away from the stumps where her legs used to be and the gore-tinged bandages that wrapped her body. She didn't look like Jane Shepherd anymore; she was a ruined parody of the woman he loved. Her hair had been shaved off and her skin was a sickly yellow that made her cheeks look gaunt and hollow. Her one good eye looked more like an enormous bruise and her mouth was full of pulverized teeth. She was barely breathing on her own though her heart was still beating strongly, perhaps one of the only major organs not completely damaged.

It was hard to say what happened to Jane Shepherd after she had managed to successfully reach the Citadel and activate the Crucible. The Reapers were dead, annihilated by the combined efforts of the galaxy and the miraculous contributions of an Alliance commander. When a sweep of the Citadel was made in the aftermath of the battle it took days to locate Shepherd, even with the miniature beacon installed in her N7 armor leading the way, standard issue for every set of Alliance armor allotted to operatives known to be assigned to covert and sensitive missions. Despite the shock of a Reaper invasion still dogging the survivors it was still staggering to discover the extent of unknown territory within the Citadel, an entire under-city of passages and cavernous rooms full of enigmatic machines. Bodies clogged every hallway and a path had to be cut through the carnage; most of the rescuers were vomiting all over their shoes by the time Commander Shepherd was at last located. The bodies of Captain Andersen and the Illusive Man were recovered as well amongst the rubble. It was assumed Shepherd was dead too when one of the rescue team noticed her chest rising and falling as they began to cart her away.

She was being hailed as the savior of every sentient species and possibly the galaxy's most un-killable soldier. Garrus wasn't so sure she was going to live long enough to have accolades for either of those claims but he kept hoping. Money wasn't a problem, no one was asking to get paid keeping the galaxy's liberator alive and no one was begrudging her the least service or supply. As civilization was rebuilding itself Shepherd's doctors were busy trying to rebuild _her_.

"It's a little easier this time around in some ways." Miranda had told him, "In other ways it's so much more difficult. We weren't trying to keep her alive when we started Lazarus, we didn't have to worry about dosing her with anesthesia or keeping her vitals steady enough to operate. She was dead. There wasn't much more we could do to her to make things worse and by the time she was finally alive again it wasn't nearly so touch and go with keeping her stable as it is now. There were a few scares, yes, but they were always containable. I wish I could say the same about her new condition." It was not a subject Garrus cared to dwell on but Miranda's half-hearted attempts to comfort him were surprising. He had not realized the extent of her relationship with the commander—he hadn't even known they were friends. But it was easy to see that Miranda regarded her as such in the way she doted over the barely stitched together form of her ex-CO. The mothering aspect of her was completely unexpected but oddly reassuring. This was a woman, Garrus suspected, who would never give up on Shepherd no matter what the circumstances came to—she had already accomplished the unthinkable before, hadn't she?

Of course he wasn't nearly so pleased with her now as he had been then. Miranda Lawson was poised by the window of Shepherd's hospital room, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared him down. Her back was to the window and the light filtering through it gave her figure a glowing halo that didn't match the glower darkening her face. "She is not going to be awake for at least a month, maybe longer with all the surgery that needs to be done. I promise you you're not going to miss her first conscious moments, Officer Vakarian." Miranda never called him by his first name, which would, admittedly, have felt wildly inappropriate for too many reasons he couldn't name. Not that he liked her calling him 'Officer Vakarian' much either, her tone had little respect for the station she was supposedly acknowledging.

"So you're asking me to abandon her, right, of course." His eyes swept over Shepherd's slumbering figure. She still looked awful but her breathing didn't sound like a torturous process anymore, he'd noticed. "Because I can just walk away from her while she's struggling for life. Sure. You have odd ideas about how turians exercise our affections, Lawson." He angled his head away from her, shifting in his chair to stare at Shepherd's face. New skin had been grafted on to the left side and she no longer looked so hellishly disfigured—he wanted to hold her hand and joke about how they had matching scars. All of the doctors kept saying that by the time they'd finished facial reconstruction she'd look almost exactly the same as before. Human faces were, apparently, much easier to repair, being more pliable than turian ones.

"She's in a medicated coma." Miranda insisted, "Shepherd is not going to wake up until we want her to—and that's still a long ways off. Any sooner and she'd die, so yes I can guarantee that you are not going to miss her waking up because I will be able to actually tell you when she is going to wake up, _Officer Vakarian_." She paced on her end of the room, beginning to bristle at him in frustration. They had been at it with each other for almost an hour, recycling their arguments every few minutes.

"I don't understand why you want me gone so badly." He dug his hands into the armrests of his chair, rooting himself more firmly to the spot, as if she might call in guards to bodily remove him. "How exactly is leaving the woman I'm in love with supposed to help anything?"

Miranda narrowed her eyes, "One: everyone else has managed to keep themselves busy with work that is very much _necessary_ to the reconstruction of civilized life except _you_. Two: you're agitating the doctors by staying here. You will be _hindering_ her healing process more than helping it—the only person benefitting from your insistence on remaining by Shepherd's side is you. As much as you'd like to think she knows you're here I can say with a hundred percent certainty that Shepherd doesn't know anything at the moment. She is, as I mentioned, _in a medicated coma_." Garrus gave one low snort and turned his eyes back to Shepherd again.

Glare deepening, Miranda paced the room and then stopped, pursing her lips at Garrus. "Look, don't you have a family? A sister and father?" He grunted at her, not wanting to hear why she knew that. "Exercise some of your affections on them, Vakarian. I _promise_ that when it's time for us to wake Commander Shepherd the first person I will be contacting is you. She's in terrible shape right now but I think we've actually managed to get past a turning point with her. She's going to live, I'm almost positive of it. Complications will arise, they always do, but we literally have the best medical minds in the galaxy watching over her. None of us want to see her die, you know that."

"And what if something does happen? And I'm not here? What if you send me off to go stare at the rubble of my home world and in the meantime Shepherd dies on the operating table? I'd rather face another Reaper down on foot than leave and find out I've missed her last moments of life. Or that I wasn't there to greet her when she woke up—that's almost worse."

Miranda unfolded her arms and stood at attention, "I am giving you my absolute promise on my honor that Shepherd is going to recover. There are other people in your life, Vakarian. You should remember that."

Garrus ran one hand over his face, "Shit." He left the next morning on a ship bound for Palaven.

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AN: please forgive any minor mistakes, I'm editing this by myself and it's easy to miss little spelling errors. Anything bigger than that should be pointed out so I can be embarrassed about it.


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note: This fic won't always go in a linear timeline, that just means I'm throwing in chapters that fall in the past relation-wise to the plot. I'll make sure to mark any special chapters.

Disclaimer: all characters and ideas belong to Bioware.

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_Memory_

She was pale as pale and turned an unattractive shade of boiled-lobster red in the sunlight—her skin apparently incapable of tanning. She was freckled too, everywhere: her legs, arms, chest, ass, and especially her face. As she explained to Wrex once it was not a _condition_, merely an inherited physical trait. She was short-ish and compact, not bulky but hard as stone. Her hair, cropped in a no-nonsense cut that left only enough bangs to hang across her forehead, was a rusty orange. Her green eyes were glass and steel, not beautiful but solid most times and soft when she was smiling.

"Is it awkward for me to ask if you're handsome by turian standards?" she was watching Garrus from her desk, resting her chin on one hand while the other was tapping a nonsensical rhythm. She grimaced and shook her head, "Never mind. That's awkward. Too awkward. Sorry." Shepherd mumbled with uncharacteristic insecurity while she fiddled with the hem of her uniform, "What I meant to say was…what are turian beauty standards like?" Endless questions, some of them frank and unwittingly tactless—but he liked that about her. Her curiosity was always tempered with understanding as much as it was driven by a voracious need for information.

"Trying to figure out how much of a catch I am, Shepherd?" Garrus was fiddling with one of the model ships she bought from the Citadel. There were at least five or six of them; all still in their boxes, their miniscule parts un-built. When he first pointed that out she grumbled to him that she thought they came pre-made and glowered when he laughed at her and the jumbled attempt she had made of the Destiny Ascension.

His retort to her question made Shepherd smirk, "Just trying to size up possible competition. If you're some kind of turian Mr. Universe I might have to start locking you in my cabin."

"Huh. The loss of efficiency to the main battery will be enormous. You sure you want to jeopardize the lives of your crew for one, admittedly dashing, turian Spectre-reject?" His tone was confident and jovial but Garrus fretted over the fumblings he made in conversation with her, which happened often when they were breaching amorous territories. It hadn't seeped in to regular conversation yet, a relief for him, and they still bantered with an easy and familiar humor that set him at ease. It was a different tone from the one they first had when he met her, three or so years ago. Of course their relationship now was also radically different from the one they had only a year past, still—when he thought about the sometimes stiff conversation he used to have with Shepherd those first few months on the Normandy he had to marvel at the way they had changed. Her wry humor was something he appreciated and reciprocated.

"Officer Vakarian, you wouldn't risk insubordination by criticizing your superior officer so openly, would you? That's thin ice you're treading there."

"I'm not sure what your charming, human metaphor is implying, commander, but a good superior knows when her crewmen are giving her sound advice. All I'm saying is that anyone else calibrating the battery will probably kill us all. I do set a high standard."

"High standards? And this from the man—wait," she laughed, "you didn't answer my question. Come on, what sort of traits do your people find attractive? Fringes and hips, right?"

"You're simplifying it, but yes. A well-defined waist is very attractive in our species, so is a smooth, symmetrical fringe." He paused, thinking, "Symmetry's big, actually. It's hard to think a girl's pretty if one of her mandibles doesn't quite match the other." He tapped the side of his face, "Smooth plating's another one, you don't take proper care of it and cracks show up. Not very alluring, that. It varies from person to person, though. Some of the colonies have distinctive facial structures too. It's like…humans have races—I read about them in some article years ago. Turians have races too, but they taught us in biology that it was from the isolation of the colonies. Go to Palaven and you'll see a lot of diversity but in the colonies people start to look a little more like one another. Ask Mordin about it. He probably has a better grasp of turian genetics than I do. Anyway, point is that in different places there's going to be different standards. And to answer your burning question, no. I'm not much to look at in turian respects, the scars ruin that."

"What? No. The scars make you look dangerous," Shepherd was grinning at him, "that's sexy."

"You're a little more krogan than I thought, commander."

Shepherd snorted, lounging in her chair while Garrus attached a leg onto the miniature Sovereign she purchased months back. Strange that someone had thought making a model of the ship that kicked the legs out from under the Citadel Council was a clever souvenir. _I guess I bought one, didn't I?_ But Sovereign held a special connotation for her, a warning and a sign of victory. It was the start of her odyssey and, she suspected, the end of it too.

"Shepherd," Garrus startled her from the heavy reverie of Sovereign and her spine straightened out of habit as she sat at attention, turning her head toward him. "What do humans find attractive?" She could hear the curiosity and a hint of apprehension and grinned so he wouldn't feel nervous about the potential insult his question, _her_ question, breached.

"Well some basic ones would be big breasts on women," she gestured at her chest, "glossy, healthy-looking hair. White, straight teeth. Small, well-defined features." Shepherd pursed her lips as she thought, "Unblemished skin…Women enjoy well-muscled men, of course. Tallness is pretty attractive," she smirked at him, "and I guess symmetry is pretty important to us too, though it's a bit more subtle with humans than it is turians. If you're looking for a portrait of a desirable woman I'd say look at any particularly well-endowed asari and you'd have a good start. Add hair to that though, the tentacle-head thing isn't what most guys back on Earth would want in a woman."

"Ah yes, human hair. I've met some people who think it's the most bizarre thing." His eyes rose to scrutinize hers, "It is strange stuff."

"You're not going to ask me to shave it off, are you?"

He barked a laugh, "I wouldn't dream of it, Shepherd. If I'm going to have an inter-species love affair I want the whole experience."

"I thought you got a pretty good notion of that a few nights ago." Her eyebrows were raised and her mouth traced a pattern on her face of an expression he had learned was mischievous. She was brazen about it, their affair; she wasn't flaunting it in front of the crew but everyone knew the commander's visits to the battery weren't to discuss algorithm optimization. There were other little hints of their fraternization that he was still getting used to while learning about human intimacy.

Garrus cleared his throat but grinned back, which made her snort out loud with laughter. Turian smiles, she told him, looked ridiculous. He asserted it wasn't his species fault and that they had picked it up from the asari since his people's faces were not particularly amenable to smiles, at least in the same sense as humans, asari, and batarians regarded them. He also asserted that making fun of his smile just perpetuated the sentiment that humans were all racists, which only made her laugh harder. A turian smile, as Shepherd always differentiated them, was a splaying of both mandibles, exposing the needle-teeth of a turian's sharp face.

"And to answer _your_ burning question," Shepherd continued, "I don't know how much of a looker I am. Guess it depends on who you ask."

"That's about the right amount of vagueness and evasion."

"Ha! Fair enough." Shepherd shrugged, "I remember this one guy I went on a date with a while ago. Don't recall his name," she squinted as she tried to remember, "he was Asian. A little taller than me, had a crooked nose—looked like he'd broken it a few too many times. It was years back; I think I was still in the first couple months of my training after I got recruited into the Alliance. Anyway the only reason I really remember anything about him is because at the end of our dinner he told me I had a face like a knife." Shepherd grinned, "I didn't call him back."

"What does that mean?"

"Well…at worst it was an insult and at best it was a back-handed compliment. I guess he was saying I've got sharp features." She scratched at her jaw, "It doesn't have to mean I'm unattractive but it's not a very flattering observation. Most of the men in my life didn't have a lot of time for delicate beauties though; they beat that out of you in the military pretty good." _Not that I've had a lot of men in my life._

"Alenko," Garrus drew out his name in a ponderous drawl, hesitating to mention him at all, "he thought you were…he liked you."

"Kaidan," Shepherd's face drew into itself, becoming pensive, "yeah. He told me I was beautiful, once." She shook her head, "What are you trying to get yourself jealous?" she smiled at him, eyes thoughtful, "If this is about me and other humans—you know I could have just as easily seduced Jacob, or maybe I could have gone after Joker, huh?" She got up out of her chair and planted both fists on her hips, "But not me. I like a challenge. A ship as big as the Normandy? At least half of the crew men? Me the powerful, prestigious, savior of humanity." She punctuated her words each with a swaying step in his direction. "I could've had plenty but no, I wanted the turian."

"Well I guess I didn't have much of a chance then. It was that or get run off the ship, a woman who comes back from the dead to kick the Reapers in their collective, metal asses probably wouldn't let a few rejections from a floundering ex-vigilante stop her." He had his hands on her hips as hers rested on his shoulders.

"Damned straight." She pressed her lips against his mouth for a brief kiss and then leaned heavily against him, chin resting on the top of his head. She stood there with him in silence while he inhaled, nose pressed against her chest. Shepherd smelled a little like sweat and a lot like the soap provided to all the Cerberus crew members. It was a plain scent, like clean linens and cold air. Her arms went around his neck and she squeezed him gently, "Let's have another interspecies awkwardness thing later."

"Shepherd, your lack of self-control is unprofessional." His words were muffled in the folds of her shirt, "People are going to talk."

"I'm sorry, did I make that sound like a request? That was more of an order, Officer Vakarian."

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AN: Thank you for reviews and comments.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Note: Thanks for reading.

__Disclaimer: all characters and ideas belong to Bioware.

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_A Dream_

Somewhere far off a little boy was crying. She knew him before his crouching figure ever materialized out of the mists. He turned to her, he was bloody and his nose was broken. She could see trails of red leaking from his eyes and ears as he whimpered at her. "You killed me."

She spat at him, "Of course I did—you were going to murder us all." Disgust overwhelmed her, she had never hated anything so much. She hugged herself, suddenly cold. Where was her armor? Where was her clothing? The heavy mists churning around her left a coat of water on her skin and she shivered, trying to warm herself. Her eyes were riveted on the boy of her nightmares. Her hatred flared again, how dare it wear the visage of innocence? Slithering around in the skin that had become her embodiment of failure? It was mocking her, the little shit. Kill it—she wanted to kill it again. Her fists balled, fingers itching to grip her pistol's trigger. This was not a child, it was a monster. She should have shot it before destroying the Reapers; she'd probably lost her chance now.

As she hissed at it blood began to flow from its ears and run down from its eyes in twin red floods. More blood dribbled out of its nose and mouth, its skin began to bubble and blacken—bursting in yawning blisters that sprayed her with pus. Where the pus struck her skin corrosive burns sizzled and she clawed at her arms and face, shredding her cheeks and forearms. She screamed as it dissolved into ashes in front of her, her jaw cracking as she shrieked at the gray skies.

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_The Present_

Seeing Shepherd incapacitated—dying—back on Earth was a knife lodged in his chest. Seeing Palaven still in flames almost a month after the end of the Reaper invasion was like a blade in his gut. It ached to see but unlike Shepherd's recovery he had no doubts Palaven could be made whole again. It would take time for the turian population to return to its former number but cities could be rebuilt and most of their planet's natural features were untouched by the Reapers. They hadn't been interested in deforestation, after all.

His arrival at the Voltus building was met with more fanfare than he felt comfortable with. Garrus was, at the moment, the most celebrated war hero among the turian people. His new celebrity status was more trouble than he had expected. His past career highlights off the Normandy included muckraking C-Sec detective and Omega vigilante—neither of which had actually garnered him public attention, at least not the kind that made him out to be admired rather than a threat. His ship landed and an entire crowd was waiting to welcome the man who had represented the turian race in the war against the Reapers—and had a direct hand in winning it. He wasn't sure yet exactly what the story was about his involvement with the heroic Normandy crew's attack against the Reaper forces on Earth and their spectacular destruction but he had a feeling there was plenty of wild speculation. A passel of reporters pounced as he stepped down the shuttle ramp, cameras hovering and flitting in the air as they ran videos and snapped pictures at the same time.

"Garrus Vakarian! How does it feel to finally return to your home planet after emerging victorious from Earth?"

"Is it true that the Alliance hero Commander Shepherd, the human who put PrimarchVictus in office, is still alive?"

"What are your plans now that the war is over? Will you be entering any official positions in the government?"

"How much truth is there in the rumors that you're being offered a position as a general? Do you intend to accept?"

Something about the reporters rankled him—why weren't they off building temporary shelters or volunteering as medics? Some of them weren't even turians, he could only assume they'd come to Palaven to report on its progress or maybe even just to bother him. As Garrus made it past the initial crowd, cameras and all, he tried to orient himself. The reporters were being held back by security—more bodies that should have been helping with reconstruction—he assumed had been assigned to him by the primarch. He'd called his father and sister to let them know he was coming home, his father probably had the foresight his son never possessed to contact Primarch Victus beforehand. The Voltus building, before the invasion, was an enormous convention center in Cipritine. It had been adapted into a shelter where thousands were being housed as reconstruction marched along. It was also where his father and sister had settled into as their makeshift home until they were assigned one of the reconstruction bunkers being built for survivors.

Their kinship to him had, for the first time, garnered them a special place among the more privileged refugees. An unfair advantage, perhaps, but one he was grateful for having been allotted to them nonetheless. Knowing his father, and sister, they weren't lazing in whatever room they'd been given but were out helping with the restoration efforts. Unless of course Solana's injury was keeping her bedridden—she'd hate that. Their family was an active one, an expected trait of character in turian citizens. He could hear her whining already, hobbling around the room complaining about how slowly she was healing. Garrus was sure a few days of Solana's moaning would make him as sick of her as he'd ever been when they were still living close enough to visit each other but right then he could only smile at the thought.

A breathless youth was dogging his heel as he entered the shelter. Since she wasn't being tackled by security he guessed she was probably some aide tasked with babysitting the celebrity on his trip back home. Sure enough, when she finally caught up to him she whipped out a badge and introduced herself as Niala Victus—niece of the primarch. "I'm here to help you find whatever or whoever you need. If you have any questions at all I can answer them and if I can't I'll find someone who can." She was nervous and couldn't stop her mandibles from fluttering slightly as she tried to conceal it. Garrus eyed her, she was young and pretty; her plates were a deep red that contrasted the stark white of her intricate colonial tattoos. She was short for a turian, even a female, and he could see her drawing up as he scrutinized her, trying to make herself just a bit taller. He nodded at her; she probably hadn't even finished up her mandated service in the military when the invasion began. He wondered what unit she belonged to, whether or not she'd been on a ship or fought as a ground troop on the home world or the moon. His curiosity, however, did not disincline him from keeping his mouth shut. Garrus felt brittle, eager to reunite with his family but still seething about having to leave Shepherd on her own.

"So you know where my family is?" he asked, hefting his luggage, a solitary duffel bag, onto his shoulder.

"Yes sir, I do, sir. Please just come this way." The deference people tended to show him nowadays was a strangely pleasant perk to his new reputation. He still wasn't sure if it felt right but he had felt vindicated ever since his father helped him prod the Hierarchy into organizing his task force. Then he'd been catapulted to even higher and more complex responsibilities like establishing the turian refugee camp on the Citadel and advising the primarch. He hadn't been officially promoted yet but the offers had come. Whether he wanted to accept the promotions was a more prickly issue he wasn't willing to deal with until he had at least one thing confirmed—Shepherd's health. How would they make it work if he was expected to stay on Palaven as one of the primarch's advisors? His home world wasn't even amenable to human physiology without extensive and ultimately temporary assistance measures. Garrus couldn't help but think of some far flung planet like Virimire where he and Jane could build a lonely house by the water and spend their days shooting at whatever random targets they wanted, lounge on the beach naked, or do occasional work for their respective governments when they needed the exercise.

Married life with Shepherd gave him pause; he still needed to explain that relationship development to his family. He cursed in the privacy of his thoughts as he hurried after the scurrying figure of Niala Victus. She led him up six flights of stairs, which was choked with refugees-turned volunteers who were moving in and out of the center to work and rest. More than a few recognized who he was, the scars were dead obvious; saluting turians and hushed whispers trailed in his wake. When his guide finally presented him with a door, one he presumed his family's accommodations was concealing, Garrus was drained. Coming back to Palaven, seeing its smoking desolation, being set on by reporters, the security, the attention, the stares, and the scrambling of his thoughts as he tried to devise a way to ease into the conversation of his cross-species girlfriend—it was not the welcome he wanted.

Niala inclined her head as he moved to enter the room, "My family is stationed just across the hall, sir. Please let me know if you need assistance, any assistance at all. I'm honored to have met you and even more honored to be able to help—if you need it, I mean."

"Thank you, Victus. Please send your uncle my regards if you happen to see him."

"Of course sir, thank you so much, sir." Niala bubbled and scrambled away to the quarters she'd just pointed out to him. He chuckled, she was a bright and friendly girl. It was nice to see a little youthful exuberance, even better knowing there were young turians with spirits not completely crushed by all the devastation. As Niala disappeared Garrus straightened himself, dropping his bag off his shoulder. He breathed deep and then rapped his knuckles against the smooth metal surface of the door. It slid open immediately, his sister had been waiting for him.

Solana Vakarian's arms reached up to squeeze him around the neck, "Oh Spirits, you're home." His father towered behind her, he always seemed so tall but Garrus was never sure if that wasn't in part colored by his intense feelings of inadequacy that his father was so tangled in. Markus Vakarian still dressed like he was a C-Sec captain, all suits and clean-cut precision. His clothing, at the moment, showed a few signs of wear and tear that Garrus could only assume came from spending months on the run from Reaper forces. Still, for all the trials that suit must have endured it looked remarkably well maintained. Then again someone might have given it to him; he was, after all, the father of the galaxy's most famous turian officer.

Solana moved aside, shuffling in her cast, and Markus walked up to his son and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Welcome home." Relief, apprehension, happiness, melancholy—he felt them all as his father's hand rested against the plating of his armor. Solana would want to bother him about wearing battle armor home but that was just another one of Garrus' quirks, one she was used to.

"It's good to see you, dad. It's good to see both of you." Garrus pulled his sister back into another hug and nodded at his father. "I can't even remember the last time we talked. I know that wasn't even that long ago but…Well lately everything feels like it's about twenty hours longer nowadays."

His father picked up his bag as his sister led him into their room. "People keep coming by to ask about you," she told him, "we get so many questions. Everyone was excited when word got around you were coming back to Palaven." Her leg was healing well, she'd already explained over one of their video calls, and their father hadn't suffered more than some fractures to his plating and a couple of non-lethal gunshot wounds. Their luck, considering the rate of mortality, was remarkable. It had to be a family thing, he figured, it was just as inconceivable that he'd survived this long in spite of being involved in so many of Shepherd's missions of insanity. In fact he'd done a better job of staying alive than she had, a thought that made him queasy.

His family's quarters were nicer than he expected, it was all one large space—not unusual since it probably used to be a board room of some kind. His sister and father had accumulated furnishings, somehow, and there were two cots with a table and chairs and even a couch set up inside. There was a third makeshift cot set up in the far corner, for him he supposed, and it hugged the wall of windows that made up the left half of the room. It was spare but neat and showed no outward signs of dilapidation. There could have been at least five or six more beds crowded in but the Vakarian family had been allowed their space and privacy. A stack of folded clothes in another corner caught his eye and he took his bag from his father and set it down by them. He swiveled around to eye Solana and Markus, "Have you two been all right? Are you resting enough and not moving too much on your injury? Can you tell me how the reconstruction's been going?"

"As well as you could expect with that monstrous power surge that came from the super-weapon you helped build." Solana limped to the couch and sat down, waving her brother over. "Machinery was a little haywire for a bit, but it got sorted. A lot of computers got fried but other than making it really inconvenient to talk to anyone long distance we managed all right. There are dozens and dozens of bunkers going up every day and more and more people are moving into them. For a while there was some tension between a couple of colony groups who had showed up to fight off the invasion and ended up staying afterwards but it worked itself out. The primarch came out and reminded the idiots that most of our species had already been killed off by the Reapers and we didn't need more of us dying over pointless, historical quibbles."

"Victus is a good man." Markus interceded, "I'm grateful he ended up being next in the chain of command. If some soft-plated, bare-faced fool stumbled into the primarch's seat I'm sure we'd all be stains on the ground." It was high praise from a man who had once counted the former primarch his friend.

Garrus nodded, "We were lucky to intercept him before he got into another fight back on Menae. Shepherd showed up at the right time."

"You have to tell us about Commander Shepherd," Solana shook his arm and her face fluttered excitedly, "everyone kept asking about how you've been serving under her for years—ever since that Spectre went crazy."

"Saren Arterius." Garrus supplied, "Yeah. The only other crew mate who's served under her longer was Joker, the Normandy's pilot, and Major Alenko—and that was really only by a couple of weeks." He drew himself up with pride, "Tali Zora, she's a quarian admiral, has been around with our crew for some time too—she was just a kid when we started out. Funny to think she's one of the quarians' newest and well-loved leaders. I don't think she's even close to thirty yet."

"And you don't think people aren't sitting up whenever you walk by?" Solana jostled his shoulder and laughed, "Or have you forgotten you're one of the primarch's top adivisors?"

His father didn't join in on his daughter's laughter; he was frowning, brow plates drawn tight over his forehead. "You address your commanding officer so informally." Markus rumbled, "I didn't think human military conduct was so lax."

Garrus felt his stomach drop, "It's not that dad, it was just something that…happened on the Normandy."

"You decided it was appropriate to forget this woman was your superior?"

Solana threw up her hands, "_Dad!_"

"No, dad. I didn't forget I just—Shepherd and I had a—" This was not how he was going to tell his family about the woman he loved, it wasn't the right atmosphere. He sat there shaking his head for a moment before he cleared his throat, "Shepherd and I are good friends. Technically, yes, she's my commanding officer but she never forgot that I was really a C-Sec agent and not completely under her power of authority. Not that I would disobey one of her orders, she's the best soldier I've met in my life and her orders deserve to be followed. If there's a job that needs to be done and you expect an army's worth of impossible odds to get in your way you better damn well call Commander Shepherd. The best of the best dad, I've never forgotten that and I've always given her the respect she deserves because of it." This was exactly the kind of conversation he'd expected from his father, good to know Markus was still predictable even after the trauma of a Reaper invasion. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his sister simmering, she hated when they fought. Never mind she started plenty of arguments herself, watching Garrus and Markus have verbal sparring matches made her seethe. He shut himself up, if Markus was going to start picking at him he could at least have the decency to snipe at his father in his head instead of out loud. They'd probably end up fighting more when Solana wasn't around anyway.

His father seemed to conclude the same thing because he shut his mouth too and a thick silence hung over the room for a minute until Solana broke it. "So how is Commander Shepherd? All the networks are reporting on her but they've got the hospital she's staying in complete locked down. A few of them are even saying she's already passed but the Alliance doesn't want to admit it yet."

Garrus shuddered, "Shepherd's still alive—barely. No one's sure what happened to her on the Citadel but it was bad. She lost both of her legs, one of her hands, an eye…" he trailed off, his head hanging. "When I left Earth she was a little better but there's not much holding her together except tubes and a lot of hope." How much of that was his hope he kept to himself.

"Spirits." Solana's face was solemn, "They say she's got the best medical team the galaxy's ever seen looking after her. Cross-species and everything."

"Yeah. Never thought I'd see the salarians giving her anything but an invitation of a view of their cloacas, but even they showed up to give their support. Kept an eye on them for a bit, wasn't sure I trusted them. The Dalatross isn't very fond of the Commander after the whole Genophage incident."

"That's something else! You have to tell me about it—it was all over the net for weeks even with the Reapers blowing everything to shit. I want to hear all about it, I want to hear about the rachni too! Garrus, there are so many stories I want to hear!" Solana gushed and Markus pulled a chair over to listen to his son recount his adventures.

Garrus leaned back into the couch as he began, "The rachni stories are a little gruesome, I actually encountered them years back when Saren was still alive. Shepherd was investigating this one sighting of Matriarch Benezia—don't know how much she showed up in the news but she was this well-respected asari matriarch, you know the type. Well she took me and Benezia's daughter, Dr. Liara T'soni—used to be an archeologist back then—with her as we went snooping around Noveria—colder environment than I liked, and I'm not just talking about all the damn snow…"


End file.
